Wake Up Everybody

Released on Philadelphia International Records in November 1975, Wake Up Everybody was the fourth and final studio album Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes recorded with Teddy Pendergrass as lead vocalist before his departure for a solo career. Produced by Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff at Sigma Sound Studios, it became the group's first platinum record and their last Top 10 pop album, reaching number nine on the Billboard Top LPs chart and topping the Soul LPs chart.

Most of the album's material was written by the in-house Philadelphia International team of Gene McFadden, John Whitehead, and Victor Carstarphen, though Gamble and Huff contributed several tracks directly, including the soon-to-be-standard "Don't Leave Me This Way." The title track, built around a slow-building call to civic conscience, became the group's second and final number one on the Soul Singles chart and has since been read as a direct descendant of Marvin Gaye's socially conscious soul records earlier in the decade.

The record closed out an unusually prolific year for the group, who had released To Be True only nine months earlier. Pendergrass's exit shortly after its release marked the end of the classic Blue Notes lineup's commercial peak, and the album is now remembered as both a high point for the Gamble and Huff production machine and a bittersweet closing chapter for the group that made it.